Friday 30th May, 7 PM start. The Caledonia, 2 Catharine Street, Liverpool, L7 7DX. Joanne Ashcroft and Rhys Trimble.
Otoliths
Issue 33 of Otoliths is now online, with work from Anne Gorrick, SS Prasad, Richard Lopez & Lars Palm, Paul Pfleuger, Jr., Mark Melnicove, Mark Reep, Márton Koppány, Peter Ganick, Philip Byron Oakes, Jack Galmitz, Eric Hoffman, David-Baptiste Chirot, Bob Marcacci, David Dick, Youdhisthir Maharjan, Raymond Farr, Steven Fraccaro, Heidi A. Howell, Scott Metz, A. J. Huffman, Richard J. Fleming, John M. Bennett, Les Wicks, Howie Good, Jean Vengua, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Martin Edmond, Sheila e. Black & Courtney Spohn, Sheila e. Black & Caleb Puckett, Andrew Taylor, Sophie Herxheimer & Andrew Taylor, Bobbi Lurie, Wayne Mason, Cecelia Chapman & Jeff Crouch, Diana Magallón, Mitchell Garrard, Robert McDonald, Joe Balaz, Claudio Parentela, Sara Jean Lane, Chris Ashby, Anne Elvey, bruno neiva, Lakey Comess, Maria Garcia Teutsch, Nicholas Bon, Francesco Aprile, Simon Perchik, Steve Tills, Owen Bullock, Anela Aliotis, Olivier Cans, Mark DuCharme, Sarah James, Roger Williams, Massimo Stirneri, Jeff Harrison, Alberto Vitacchio, Neil Ellman, Carla Bertola, Aditya Bahl, Cat Leonard, Anne-Marie JEANJEAN, John Pursch, sean burn, Lucy Wilks, Pete Spence, Willie Smith, Jake Goetz, Johannes S. H. Bjerg, Marcia Arrieta, Sam Langer, Susan Kachor Conlon, J. D. Nelson, nathaxn walker, Jim Eigo, Michael Brandonisio, Bob Heman, Spencer Selby, Bogdan Puslenghea, Ric Carfagna, Reijo Valta, Carey Scott Wilkerson, Katrinka Moore, & Javant Biarujia.
Peter Jaeger: Martyrologies
Martyrologies opens this Friday at 12.30pm, Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Writing, School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury. Closing time: 6.30pm Saturday 10th May. Admission: free. The installation will run for the duration of the Fear and Loathing: Phobia in Literature and Culture conference, but you do not have to be a delegate to attend.
What do modernist and contemporary traditions of found poetry and conceptual wri ting have to do with Christian history? The sound installation Martyrologies borrows and recontextualizes sentences drawn from Bede, John Foxe, Thieleman van Braght, and other Christian accounts of martyrdom, in order to underline the paradoxical inscription of subjectivity found in these early texts.
Each sentence in the poem was selected specifically because it represents a martyr’s death, and the surrounding story of events leading up to that death has been omitted. Martyrs gain identity precisely at the moment of their own demise 3B in effect, their death is the event which gives them historical subjectivity.
The text’s montage of found sentences defamiliarizes its source material, thereby interrogating connections between narrative and religious identity, and reworking traditional accounts of European religious history. An earlier version of Martyrologies was published in Jaeger’s Eckhart Cars (Salt 2004). This event is organised by Amy Evans as part of the Fear and Loathing: Phobia in Literature conference in the Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Writing at the University of Kent, 9th-10th May 2014.
Poetry in Collaboration reading at The Poetry Library
As part of the Poetry in Collaboration exhibition at The Poetry Library, a special Camarade event will be held on May Tuesday 20th. As well as a quick introduction to the exhibition itself, around a half dozen pairs of poets, some of the most memorable from previous incarnations of Camarade, will read original collaborations, including James Byrne & Sandeep Parmar, James Davies & Philip Terry, Sam Riviere & Joe Dunthorne, Samantha Walton & Jo Walton. Please rsvp at specialedition@poetrylibrary.org.uk as space is limited, but entrance is free.
Poetry in Collaboration exhibition
The exhibition furthers and re-contextualises the concerns of the Enemies project (www.weareenemies.com) in panoramic scope, drawing from the vast collection of the poetry library to reveal a small sliver of the modern history of poetry in collaboration, to evidence, in microcosm, just how fundamental a shared practise can be to poetry.
On display will be new works commissioned by the Enemies project, including book art by Ragnhildur Johanns and Iain Sinclair, as well as collaborations by Ian Hamilton Finlay and John Furnival, Ron King and Roy Fisher, Anne Waldman and Joe Brainard, amongst many others. There will be an extensive reading table, an audio station with live collaborative recordings of the Beats, and videos of works by Robert Desnos and Man Ray, as well as footage from the Camaradefest, held last year at the Rich mix arts centre in London.
The exhibition runs from 6 May 2014 to 6 July 2014 and is free to attend at the Saison Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall
David Miller – Collected Poems
David Miller, one of our June readers, has had his Collected Poems just published with Shearsman
David Miller, Reassembling Still: Collected Poems, Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2014. ISBN 978-1-84681-331-7. 316pp. £14.95.
David Miller was born in Melbourne (Australia) in 1950, and has lived in London since 1972. His more recent publications include The Waters of Marah (Shearsman Books, 2005), The Dorothy and Benno Stories (Reality Street Editions, 2005), In the Shop of Nothing: New and Selected Poems (Harbor Mountain Press, 2007) and Black, Grey and White: A Book of Visual Sonnets (Veer Books, 2011). He has compiled British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000: A History and Bibliography of ‘Little Magazines’ (with Richard Price, The British Library / Oak Knoll Press, 2006) and edited The Lariat and Other Writings by Jaime de Angulo (Counterpoint, 2009) and The Alchemist’s Mind: a book of narrative prose by poets (Reality Street, 2012). Spiritual Letters (Series 1-5) appeared from Chax Press in 2011, and a double CD recording of David Miller reading this same work came out from LARYNX in 2012. He is also a musician and a member of the Frog Peak Music collective.
Comprising work from the early 1970s onwards, Reassembling Still is by far the largest and most comprehensive collection of David Miller’s poetry, and includes all of his poetry that he wishes to keep, with the exceptions of the ongoing Spiritual Letters project and his visual poems.
The Blue Bus – Alan Halsey, Frances Presley, Ken White, David Miller
The Blue Bus is pleased to present a reading by Frances Presley and Alan Halsey, and music by Ken White and David Miller, on Tuesday , 13th May,l from 7.30 at The Lamb (in the upstairs room), 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1. This is the eighty-eighth event in THE BLUE BUS series. Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions). For future events in the series, please scroll down to the end of this message.
Frances Presley lives in north London. Her publications include Paravane: new and selected poems, 1996-2003 (Salt, 2004); Myne: new and selected poems and prose, 1976-2005, (Shearsman, 2006); Lines of Sight, (Shearsman 2009); Stone settings with Tilla Brading (Odyssey, 2010), and An Alphabet for Alina with Peterjon Skelt (Five Seasons, 2012). Her work is in the anthologies Infinite Difference (Shearsman, 2010), and Ground Aslant: radical landscape poetry (Shearsman, 2011). She contributed to a collection of poetic autobiographies, Cusp (Shearsman, 2012). She has translated the work of Norwegian poet Hanne Bramness, most recently No film in the camera (Shearsman 2013). Her next book, halse for hazel, will be published by Shearsman in October.
Alan Halsey will be reading from Rampant Inertia, recently published by Shearsman. His poems have been variously collected in Five Years Out (1989), Wittgenstein’s Devil (2000), Marginalien (2005) and Not Everything Remotely (2006).
David Miller is a clarinettist who has performed and recorded with The Mind Shop (a trio with Armorel Weston and John Gibbens), and performed with SpiritWORK (a duo with Rod Boucher) and as a duo with Ken White. He is a member of the Frog Peak Music collective. David is also a poet, whose most recent book is Reassembling Still: Collected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2014). He will be performing on this occasion with the Australian guitarist Ken White.
In addition to his guitar playing, Ken White is a painter who has exhibited in Australia and Scotland and whose work can be seen on the Art Limited website. He performs regularly in his native Melbourne, and has recorded with Australian vocalists Suzie Dickinson and Patsy O’Neill, as well as recording his own CD, Jazz Guitar. He has also provided the music for two films, Runway and The Roaring Tide. Ken was a member of the legendary Australian jazz rock band Nova Express in the late 1960s.
Chrissy Williams on The Verb tonight
Other Room reader Chrissy Williams appears on The Verb tonight discussing her latest book Epigraphs published by if p then q.
The show is broadcast at 10pm on Radio 3 and stays on iplayer for a week.
Shady Dealings With Language
Shady Dealings With Language is four events guest-curated around art writing and performance, in Leeds, London, Manchester and Edinburgh, programmed by Claire Potter.
The first event in the Shady Dealing With Language tour is Language Urges, programmed by writer Lauren de Sa Naylor. It will take place on Tuesday the 13th of May and includes discussion from translator, writer and academic, Eric Prenowitz; an installation and performance from renowned artist and drone musician Bridget Hayden and a one-off curation of miscellaneous writings from recently deceased and greatly missed, campaigner and educator Callum Millard.
Language Urges considers the effect of language on the body. What traces are left by language and how do they work on us? Where does the urge to articulate come from and what does that desire reveal to and conceal from us? Do we have language urges or does language urge us?
With the tenth anniversary of Jacques Derrida’s death as a backdrop, we look to a dislocation of meaning as something that is as significant for the tongue-in-cheek memo writer crafting their double address, as it is for a bi-lingual translator negotiating linguistic shifts, and equally the musician who disseminates information phenomenologically. Experience ploughs through meaning, which is itself cultivated by experience. This flux of production we can guide, signpost and fine-tune, but we can neither command nor predict the transference from one system or body to the next. We each code our knowledge according to our own poetics.
As a result, something is always perceived to be lost in translation; language tending to distort rather than transmit knowledge. But nevertheless it might be that something can be gained through bypassing and de-authorising original texts, traditions and other arbitrarily appointed authorities and systems, affording us the opportunity to delight in the elasticity of meaning and breathe in the freedom of a no man’s land.
Knives Forks and Spoons at The Text Festival
Met Arts Centre, Market St., Bury. Saturday 3rd May 3pm – 4.30pm.
The Knives Forks and Spoons Press has developed the biggest avant garde poetry list in the UK since its launch in 2009. KFS is a forum for an extraordinary range of diversity and risk-taking artistic experiment publishing seminal international figures in experimental poetry like Ed Baker, Geraldine Monk, and Robert Sheppard together with many young poets and ‘outsider’ practitioners. Performers from this great publisher celebrate experiment in readings from Ann Mathews, Lucy Harvest Clarke, Tim Allen, Tom Jenks, Richard Barrett, Bobby Parker, Rhys Trimble & Debbie Walsh.
The Life and Use of Books
THE EXHIBITION CENTRE FOR THE LIFE AND USE OF BOOKS
Artist-led reading room, forum and occasional publishing outlet.
The Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books will feature an evolving portable library, made up of independent publications and books chosen by an invited curator, alongside a permanent donated reference library.
Each collection will be on display for a period of approximately two months, during which time an artist will be invited to take up residence and produce an exhibition toward the end of their stay – responding to, and working with (or against) the library.
Presenting coherent literary collections alongside new work by artists will open up a web of connections and interpretations, with a dialogue between the two encouraged through events and commissions for emerging art writers.
The inaugural six-month pilot programme will launch with a library selected by Marcus Barnett, and artist in residence Daniel Fogarty, continuing with a library from the collection of Michael Butterworth, and Ann-Marie Milward in residence.
The Exhibition Centre for the Life and use of Books is based at ArtWork Atelier on Greengate, with events taking place at venues around Manchester and Salford beginning at Islington Mill.
The Exhibition Centre for the Life and use of Books will be open by appointment on the 8th and 9th of May, and will continue to be open to visitors on every following Thursday and Friday during May and July. More here.
OBJECTS, Andrew Spragg
Iain Britton, photosynthesis
Iain Britton, photosynthesis, automotive upholstery, cloth and vinyl hardcover, 92 pages, edition of 40 numbered copies. Out now on Kilmog Press.
Hannah Silva performing at The Other Room April 2014
This and all videos of previous readings can be found in the middle panel
TORQUE SYMPOSIUM
TORQUE SYMPOSIUM
an arts and science platform where international thinkers present new ways language, brain and technology are twisting together.
11 – 6pm / Wednesday, 30th April @ FACT, Liverpool
TICKETS
Featuring a range of talks, short film screenings and Q&A with leading thinkers in the arts, poetry, technology and cognitive sciences, the Torque Symposium seeks to address urgent questions around the changing nature of our relationship to language and thought in a digital age. In particular the day will address the ways technology affects our minds and modes of communication – and vice versa.
The symposium asks:
· As cyber-prosthetics are replaced by imperceptible interfaces, where do we draw the lines between technology, mind and modes of communication?
· What happens when technology becomes sentient?
· How is our behaviour corralled and twisted by online surveillance, targeted advertising and the compulsive spectacle of not-so-social networking?
· And how can we better understand and empower our interaction with technology?
Participants:
Lambros Malafouris // Anna Munster (online) // Cécile B Evans
Benedict Drew (video) // Imogen Stidworthy // Hannah Proctor
Holly Pester // Stephen Fortune // Alex McLean // Mez Breeze (video)
The symposium seeks in-part to foreground today’s technologies, and our use of them from the perspective of early tool making and use, and the feedbacks and blurred lines between mind and matter.”
The title of the symposium, a play on the verb ‘to talk’, and refers to torque’s original latin meaning ’to twist’, and also the twisting forces which distort language, technologies and cognitive processes by braiding them together. The cerebral torque is also a central term used by neuroscientist Tim Crow in his 2009 thesis that ‘Schizophrenia is the price Homosapians pay for language’.
Selected presentation summaries:
Keynote speaker and ‘cognitive archaeologist’ Lambros Malafouris will present his Material Engagement Theory through the lens of clay tablets and knapped flint, exploring implications that follow the human predisposition to reconfigure our bodies and extend our senses by using tools and material culture.
Artist Cécile B Evans presents and speaks about her character AGNES, which inhabits the Serpentine Gallery’s website, interacting with visitors and testing the bounds of affective relationships with technology.
Live coding practitioner Alex McLean explores the connection between silicone computers and human weavers, and how live coding is blurring the distinction between programming and natural language.
Emma Bennett performing at The Other Room April 2014
Their eyes travel across the pages and their hearts search out meaning
Saturday 26th April at 18:00–19:30. Goldsmiths’ Reading Room, Senate House Library, Russell Square, London, WC1E 7HU
Join Eros Press for an evening of readings and performances at Senate House Library, in association with Domobaal Gallery and The Jarman Film Lab.
Neil Chapman | Peter Jaeger | Rebecca La Marre | Tamarin Norwood | Holly Pester
Convened by Sami Jalili and Sharon Kivland, with Mura Ghosh.
£10 | Ticket price includes a limited edition publication produced for the event. To purchase, please visit: http://erosjournal.co.uk/product/senate-house-event
Withdrawn, intent, deaf and blind to the world, readers commune in silence. They scan and internalise, mouths made defunct in the passage of knowledge, and yet it was not always thus. Saint Augustine marvelled at the way Saint Ambrose read: ‘His eyes travelled across the pages and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and tongue stayed still.’ There is a certain amount of argument surrounding the exact moment in antiquity that the text became ingested in silence. Alberto Manguel, among others, suggests that this ‘silent perusal of the page’ was not commonplace until the tenth century. Did we lose something else, along with the innocence of our reading habits? In putting our ears away, as Nietzsche
would have it, did we too lose our voice – ‘all the crescendos, inflections, variations of tone and changes of tempo in which the ancient public world took pleasure’?
Silence is the law of the library, even in a place of such theatrical potential as the Goldsmiths’ Reading Room. In the wings though, in the private monastic spaces of its study carrels, where a reader’s lips can flutter away in a whisper, unheard, loud voices might muster. On the 26th of April, that potential will be realised, as six invited readers will make themselves heard in the silence of the public space. Emerging one by one from the privacy of their cells they will proclaim the meaning that their hearts have searched out.
Syndrome Sessions 1.0
Sat 26 April / 8pm till 11pm + Afterparty till 2am 24 Kitchen Street. Tickets £5.
24 Kitchen Street, Baltic Quarter, Liverpool.
Session 1.0 : Celebrate the launch of this year-long programme of arts and technology experimentation and see three new works exploring the sensational potential of our new performance resource, The Drome. Featuring new performance works from Hannah Silva, Nathan Jones & Mark Greenwood, and The Hive Collective. More here.
Tony Lopez: Nevermore
zimZalla object 023 is Nevermore, by Tony Lopez: silkscreen printed folding card, letterpress sleeve with rubber stamp. 44.6 x 9 cms (unfolded). Hand-printed sans serif letterforms are arranged in threes, located on each plane of the folding card. The text is a variation on Robert Creeley’s statement that ‘form is never more than an extension of content.’ This is a limited edition of 40. More details at the zimZalla site.
otherroom.org 